Slayer are playing the 2017 iteration of the Download rock festival in France on the Plessis-Pâté / Brétigny sur Orge / Cœur d’Essonne BA217 air base, which is a thirty minute drive from Paris according to the festival organizers. Every other band at this festival is some lame rock or pseudo-metal turd pusher but at least they probably do not smoke bath salts like the French president. Probably not. You can never be sure of the substances some of these degenerates ingest given how awful their music is.(more…)

Yep, just me here. A new Metallica album of all 45 rpms of pure American metal! 180 grams, limited to 500 copies. I’m gonna spin this bitch like NASCAR!

Lookin’ under the hood here, you got your Black Album riffs, you got your Pantera, and that sir, that’s gonna get you over to your cousin’s house faster than her boyfriend so you can propose to her. Now this album right here has really got me saying, “I’m glad, I’m glad it was Cliff!” That Master of Muppets there album had a lot on it I couldn’t understand in it. It was like tryin’ to make sense of one of them pieces of paper with scribbles on it, them black scribbles man.

After Slayer‘s foray into narrative composition on Hell Awaits, Slayer could have taken any number of directions in the then fertile metal landscape: gone in for the throat of aggression, matured their pubescent approach to long-form content, or paired down on riff quality for focused but circular songs. Reign in Blood was something of a compromise bred to appease more Floridian tastes which crave motion before coherence or purpose. The album is brief but bookended by two of the better songs in their discography which daftly elevate the questionable content residing in between. The remaining material siphons off of the paired down and quintessential “Angel of Death” by meandering in whatever assortment of good but disconnected riffs the Hanneman/King dichotomy happened upon in between Heinekens; held together in tacit alliances by a sweltering pace which exhausts itself right as the title track closes the record. The foresight required to write an album such as this is commendable but Reign in Blood is not Slayer’s watershed moment if for nothing more than the sheer amount of disposable songs – not riffs – which constitute the majority of the runtime. This uncomfortable fact goes unrecognized due to the sheer brevity of this work. Yet as I wrote this brief paragraph I must have recited the full album in my head at least a few times and I have not listened to the album is many years. May the resolve of Reign in Blood’s memetic warfare continue to withstand assailants from the ever flowing genre compost bin and grant listeners to the strength to withstand the torrents of nature herself.

In times of chaos, the primordial appeal of Slayer comes forth as the vision of clarity that it is. This metal fan chose to meet the winds head-on, whether as tribute to the power of the storm or resistance to it, or both. The result proves entertaining, including the possibility that the video cut off before Matthew hurled a six-ton SUV with irritating family stickers on the back into the fan, leaving a very Slayer-esque red spot on the pavement.

“I’m certainly not a political analyst, but I think that Hillary Clinton is the safe, correct choice. Trump is just a sideshow; I’m not even going to apologize to all the Trump followers. I think the reason he’s so popular is because he’s like the politics version of WWE. He’s sensational like wrestling and that’s why middle America loves him.

This gem of an opinion is brought to you by the same fan of snakes and tribal tats who was delusional enough to believe that God Hates Us All and Diabolus En Musica were well received albums; so much so that he decided to resurrect the “successful” style immediately after the only person in the band who would have told him no died. His lyrical contributions to Slayer and now public statements flaunt Repentless and irredeemably stupid opinions on human social organization.

Recently Tom Araya, frontman of seminal and legendary extreme metal band Slayer, offered some words of encouragement to Swiss concert attendees regarding their ownership of personal firearms. He makes a case for owning guns, saying that there are invaders and enemies all over the world and in your own countries and towns, who may turn weapons against you anywhere, at any time. Because of this constant threat, owning and carrying weapons of your own is advisable, says Araya, making a pertinent point. Though he made a point to use no names, Arya mentioned events “in other countries” that resulted from people thinking they were magically immune to random violence (a transparent allusion to the Orlando, Florida shootings last month, in which nearly a hundred patrons of a nightclub were gunned down over the course of a few hours and half of those ended up dead, all because of one man with a gun).

A trend in the modern conception of anything has been that the newer something else, the better we expect or assume it to be. Experience in reality, however, has also given rise to another perception: that the new tends to be worse and not better. Attempts at rationalizing this drive the pseudo-intellectual, pro-sheeple crowd to say that times just change, but ratios of quality do not vary. This is not only unscientific but an obvious politically correct answer that has as its premise that everyone is equal, and hence, that the resulting products of these “equal” people must also be probabilistically equal. Impermeable external influence seems to them the only changing factor, with the internal being either infinitely constant or practically negligible. This is assumed and then possible causes are haphazardly and desperately pieced together, the answer is assumed and then anything is either positive evidence or brushed aside if too problematic to incorporate into the fairy tale. Ignorance compounded with pretense and emotional insecurity always results in capricious imposition of an arbitrary and dogmatic concepts and scale of values.